MENOMINEE, a city and the county-seat of Menominee county, Michigan, U.S.A., on Green Bay, at the mouth of the Menominee river, opposite Marinette, Wisconsin, at the southern extremity of the upper peninsula. Pop. (1890), 10,630; (1900), 12,818, of whom 4186 were foreign-born; (1910 census), 10,507. It is served by the Chicago & North-Western, the Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul, the Wisconsin & Michigan, and the Ann Arbor railways, and is connected by five bridges with Marinette, Wisconsin. Menominee has several parks, and harbour and dock facilities for the heaviest lake vessels. It is one of the largest lumber centres in the United States; it has excellent water power, and there are manufactures of wire, steel, electrical appliances, mill and mining machinery, shoes, beet sugar and paper. The use of beet-pulp instead of Indian corn ensilage for dairy cows has promoted the dairying industry in the city.
A trading post was established here in 1799, but settlement was not begun until 1833. Menominee became the county-seat in 1874, was chartered as a city in 1883, and in 1891 and in 1901 it was re-chartered; in 1903 an amendment to the charter created a municipal court. The city is named after the Menominee Indians,[1] an Algonquian tribe formerly ranging over a considerable territory in Wisconsin and Michigan, who seem to have been first visited by whites in 1634, when Nicolet found them at the mouth of the Menominee river, and now number about 1600, most of them being under the Green Bay school superintendency, Wisconsin. The name is the Chippewa word for wild rice, which formed part of the food of the tribe.
- ↑ See W. L. Hoffman in the Fourteenth Report (Washington, 1896) of the Bureau of American Ethnology and A. E. Jenks in the Nineteenth Report (1900).